This project concerns metaphor-based reasoning and reasoning about mental states. A special concern is mental states that are described metaphorically in discourse, but the current main focus of the project is on metaphor in general. A reasoning system called ATT-Meta has been implemented. It performs some of the reasoning needed for understanding metaphorical utterances. It performs both ordinary and metaphor-based reasoning about mental states.

It aimed at the creation of interactive virtual drama system with believable intelligent avatars by combining art and virtual reality techniques.Fašadewas later developed to integrates story level interaction (drama management), believable agents, and shallow natural language processing, in the context of a first person, graphical, real-time interactive drama.

The institute carries out researches on autonomous agent, grid technology, natural language, etc. The subsidiary Center for advanced research in technology for education concentrates on developing new technologies for education and training and evaluate their effectiveness. “Steve” is an intelligent pedagogical agent to support virtual learning. The MRE is a virtual reality training environment that brings together research in intelligent tutoring, natural language recognition and generation, interactive narrative, emotional modelling, and immersive graphics and audio. The focus of the research is on creating a highly realistic and compelling face-to-face social interactions with virtual characters. Detailed publication on emotion, animation, social agents, natural language etc can be found here.

Directed by Justine Cassell, the group concentrates on the creation of conversational embodied agents including the system architecture, animation control, text to speech animation, rule and knowledge based system for learning, intelligent tutoring, and etc. A list of relevant publications can be found here.

Directed by Norman Balder, the center has been working on creation of realistic virtual human figure animation, motion and kinematics control, and expressive natural language instruction based animation. Their Parameterized Action Representation and its animation system is the center’s most influential work in the area of animated 3D intelligent avatar.

The group has been working on creation of autonomous character animation based on perception, memory, and action of the virtual agent. Significant contributions include the virtual brain structure of the synthetic character, the learning method, virtual vision system for avatars, and the “directable” agents architecture.

Directed by Daniel Thalmann, the center has been the pioneer in the area of realistic virtual human animation. Researches are mainly concentrated on real time rendering of realistic human animation, motion control/planning for intelligent avatar, emotion and personality based avatar animation, multi-agent animation in networked virtual environments,

The research group investigates the AI based system that use perception, reasoning and action to function autonomously in dynamic environments. Project “Virtual theatre” aimed at building life-like embodied virtual character for learning, education, communication applications. (relevant to eDrama)